Hidden Minds

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Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman is the creator of ZMET, a patented market research tool that, as he puts it, “lights up the shadows of the unconscious mind.” Major corporations are using ZMET to explore consumers’ subconscious thoughts about everything from fabric sprays to the Internet, and are applying what they learn to fine-tune their advertising. Zaltman recently spoke with HBR’s Gardiner Morse about consumers’ buried motivations and what he’s found in the minds of managers themselves. Following are edited excerpts of the conversation.

Your market research technique is based on the premise that consumers “don’t know what they think.” What do you mean by that?

What we really think is largely hidden from us. In other words, most of what we know we don’t know we know. Probably 95% of all cognition, all the thinking that drives our decisions and behaviors, occurs unconsciously—and that includes consumer decisions. That’s not to say that the 5% we’re privy to is unimportant—just that marketers overemphasize its importance, because it’s so visible and easy to access. ZMET gets at the thinking that’s not so visible or easy to access.

How does ZMET work?

The idea behind ZMET is that, because we think in images and metaphors, we can explore people’s subconscious thoughts by using images and metaphors. So, we begin by asking a group of subjects a question like “How do you feel about Tylenol compared with generic brands?” We then ask them to spend about a week finding eight to ten pictures from any source that captures their thoughts and feelings about using Tylenol and the generic. They bring these pictures to a one-on-one session with an interviewer, who explores with them why they chose each picture. Often they bring in pictures that at first seem to have nothing to do with the question. For example, one woman in the Tylenol study brought in a picture of a birthday cake. When we probed about this, it emerged that the cake, for her, represented nurturing. She trusted Tylenol more than the generic, and this was important in choosing a pain reliever for her husband and daughter, but not for herself. This led to a discussion about her beliefs about caring for family members and the nurturing implications of the brand name.

At the end of the interview, which usually run about two hours, we assembled the images into a digital collage representing the consumer’s conscious and unconscious feelings about Tylenol. Even though each of the subjects in this study brought in different pictures and created very different-looking collages, the same deep feelings emerged to explain when and why they use Tylenol over the store brand. We found that even though they consciously “know” that Tylenol and the generic are identical, in some cases they’ll still pay more for Tylenol because at a deeper level they “know” it works better. Their emotional knowledge overrides their rational knowledge when they make their purchases. And that insight has important implications for how Tylenol might be marketed. You’re not likely to get that type of information from a survey or focus group.

Surveys and focus groups don’t work? But they seem to have pretty good track records.

I’d challenge those track records. Most new products fail, even though the market research probably suggested they’d do well, which is why they were launched. It’s not that surveys and focus groups don’t work at all, just that you have to use the right tool for the right job. And neither surveys nor focus groups are particularly good at getting at the 95% of thinking that takes place below the surface. I’m trained in mathematical sociology. I design a lot of surveys. And surveys are really very helpful for exploring things that are already familiar to a consumer on a conscious level. So, for instance, the correlation between purchase intent, as revealed by a survey, and actual behavior for a very familiar brand is pretty high. But when you use a survey to look at purchase intent and actual behavior for new products, the correlation is often quite low. Consumers will say they’ll buy the product, but then they don’t. And when you ask them why they didn’t follow through, they often can’t tell you. This is a good example of how surveys can fail to unearth hidden motivations—and, in fact, can tell you the opposite of what’s true. The other problem with surveys, of course, is that they can’t escape the surveyor’s own bias—you get from surveys what consumers think you think they think about.

Are there situations in which focus groups provide the insight you’re seeking?

Infrequently. Maybe if you’re interested in how word of mouth is affecting consumers. I can’t think of any other instances, really. The problem is, focus groups introduce all sorts of distortions. You typically get a dominant person in the group who influences how others respond. Studies in which stooges were introduced into focus groups showed that such people can redirect the conversation, even to the point of getting people to change their recollections of, say, a shopping experience. Another problem is that no one person has much “airtime,” so there’s very little opportunity to go very deep with any one individual. You’re basically getting a lot of distorted surface reactions.

But won’t probing the subconscious also give you distorted information?

Information gathered from any research method, including ZMET, is a compromise with reality—it only gets at part of the truth. So, ideally, you want to use more than one method so that you’re making fewer compromises. We’ve done validation studies with major corporations where they looked at exactly the same problem using focus groups, surveys, ZMET, and other kinds of interviewing techniques, and in every instance, ZMET produced the same basic data as the other methods, plus a whole lot more that managers judged to be potentially actionable.

For example, we were involved in a study about hosiery orchestrated by DuPont for a consortium of firms. Conventional research had shown that the “hosiery experience”—both buying and wearing hosiery—was largely negative, and ZMET confirmed that. But we also found using ZMET that women assume hosiery is made and marketed largely by men and that they perceive this as a negative. That insight led to a new advertising campaign that conveyed more respect for women and that tried to identify with their experience.

And did this change hosiery sales?

We don’t know. The fact is, I think it’s a mistake to try to link research methods to outcomes. Procter & Gamble says that insights from ZMET about the company’s fabric spray Febreze doubled the product’s expected sales. So I’d love to take credit for that. But we don’t know if Febreze sales might have tripled—or fallen—if the data were used differently. Managers will often come to me with their market research results and ask, “Will the data tell me what to do?” But no research method is going to produce data that say, “This is what you should do.” Data don’t dictate anything; data simply promote imaginative thinking. It’s not the information that drives a result, it’s how managers interpret that information.

You’re beginning to use ZMET to probe how managers think. What are you finding?

Many of the companies using ZMET for consumer research are starting to use it to look at internal management issues. We’re gathering data on how managers feel going into a negotiation. We’re also looking at how managers perceive knowledge sharing—for instance, what are the signals that a colleague gives to show that he’s willing or unwilling to share information? And we’re also studying how managers approach unstructured or messy problems—which are the ones that typically get them into trouble. We’re finding that there is tremendous fear—fear of not being able to figure out what the first step is or of being exposed for not knowing what to do. And that has led to the finding that organizations can suppress the expression of ignorance. But when you probe deeply enough, you find that acknowledging ignorance is where learning and constructive action begin. So, companies are beginning to use such data to help managers approach messy problems. One way they’re doing this is by acknowledging that often when there’s enormous pressure to solve a problem or take action, that’s exactly when you need to take time out and step back.

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